Stanley Fish has a mantra. It is, “do your job, don’t try to do someone else’s job, and don’t let anyone else do your job.” It’s not exactly a mantra for success. But for people who like to keep their categories tidy, it will do (I suppose his mantra might have been, “a place for everything, and everything in its place”). In this instance, he is specifically urging his mantra on college and university teachers who, apparently, sometimes get confused about what precisely their job is. Fish can help: “the job of someone who teaches in a college or a university is to (1) introduce students to bodies of knowledge and traditions of inquiry they didn’t know much about before; and (2) equip those same students with the analytical skills that will enable them to move confidently within those traditions and to engage in independent research should they choose to do so.” So, that’s clear at least.

The decade or so on either side of the millennium must have been a trying time for higher education in America as it became the battleground of the culture wars. Professor Fish was caught in the crossfire but he did not remain a non-combatant for long. The strident opinion pieces he wrote at that time form the basis of this vigorous defence of a non-political academia. Fish excoriates both the left and the right. But everything comes back to his so-called mantra and his neo-Kantian definition of the job of the university teacher.

There is something curiously sentimental about Fish’s view. The unworldly teacher and scholar inducts another crop of students into the virtues of some academic discipline in an institution whose existence is an end in itself. It hardly matters, it seems, that it may not describe any university or indeed any professor you’ve ever encountered. It stands as a kind of ideal against which, perhaps, we are meant to measure our actual practice. I worry that leads to pessimism about the future of higher education in America, since our actual practice so clearly fails to measure up. On the other hand, these institutions did manage to produce a thinker like Professor Fish, so perhaps there is still hope. Cautiously recommended. ( )

“I just have a broader view than you do” ( )